What are the benefits of e-commerce?
Having a physical shop is great, it gives you a place to call your business home, a place to store your products and sell from. But what if you wanted to reach beyond your local footfall? An e-commerce website gives you the power of selling online, making possibilities endless. With an online store, you can now go from people locally visiting your shop to people globally being able to view your products and see your services. Although not essential to do business with customers around the world, people are more likely to buy online after they can see photographs and read product descriptions about your product and see costs, shipping availability and stock levels etc all at a time that is convenient to them.
Let’s say for example you are a car dealer. If you had a desirable car and someone in a completely different country was interested in buying one of these cars, but had no online presence, your first hurdle is them finding out you have one for sale. Once they know you have one, there is a matter of time zones to think about. When are you available to chat? What happens when this person phones you for information and all your staff are dealing with customers that may be only browsing. Don’t get us wrong, having someone in front of you with the intention of only browsing is an opportunity to try and change their mind and get a sale, but while you are doing that, you may have other customers waiting that you have to ask to wait until your finished.
So do I need an e-commerce website?
The beauty of selling online is your e-commerce website can hold as much or as little information about a product as you want to offer. You can offer photographs, videos, text, and downloads. With a physical shop with 5 members of staff, you can deal with a maximum of 5 customers standing in front of you. With an online e-commerce website, you could be showing your products to countless people around the globe with no one competing for your time or attention. This would give you the best of both worlds being able to spend more time face to face while allowing people to grab the information they need to decide to buy online or not. So with an online store, you could generate more sales by opening up to a global audience or a focused area that would normally be out of reach.
With more sales from further afield, you may need to expand your staff headcount. But here is something else to think about. for every 1 sale you do face to face while explaining about a product, maybe demonstrating it and then answering questions, all of this could take anything from 10 minutes to an hour, maybe even more, and all before you even get to the shipping stage. So for argument sake, let’s say you were with a customer for 1 hour and they asked for you to ship the product. Your website could have thousands of people getting the same information online and placing orders for the same product that took you no time at all except shipping. So you may need to increase your shipping staff, but not your selling staff. Physical sales staff are not required online except for those that want further information that you did not include in the product description.
The trend of buying online is always increasing. it is a great way to grow your business. We make that possibility simple. We can offer credit card payment options, PayPal options, shipping charges depending on weight and distances, variable products such as colour, size etc. We can even tie in your online store to Facebook. Why would this be another advantage? Facebook has roughly 2.89 billion active users per month. That is a ready-made market that you can tap into and start selling online too. We can also use all the same systems to put your products onto Instagram as this is part of the Facebook group.
Is an e-commerce website expensive to set up?
We generally use a system called Woo Commerce. Despite the name, it’s actually a very powerful system. Woocommerce would cover approximately 90% of all situations, but other solutions are available. We can cover all eventualities with one system or another. If you want to sell products, sell timed appointments, sell downloads, or even rent out hotel rooms, we have you covered. Woocommerce itself is free to use, there is no charge for the foundation shop system There may be charges for additional functionality, or if your requirements mean we need to opt for a different system.
